Physical Therapist Assistant Guide

Use online reference sources to define unfamiliar words and gather background information and guidelines on conditions, populations and interventions that are relevant to PTA.

These resources are good places to start:

Dynamic Health

Gale Virtual Reference

APTA has an extensive collection of evidence-based practice guidelines, interventions, and tests and measures. Use your APTA membership credential to access this content.

Physiopedia is an excellent online encyclopedia with contributors from around the globe. Find definitions, overviews, and therapeutic assessments and interventions for a wide range of conditions. Fabulous illustrations and video content, too!

LCC Library subscribes to many research databases that focus specifically on information for Health Professions. Click here to see a list of Health Professions databases and read a description about their holdings, relevant dates, or special features.

Try this database from the Oregon State Library: Physical Therapy and Sport Medicine

Or start with one of these large research databases:

Academic Search Complete

CINAHL Plus Full-text

Health Source: Nursing Academic Edition

The Library has hundreds of books and ebooks relevant to students in the PTA program but they are not all shelved together. Find resources using the Library Catalog using keywords related to your research question.

Some important subject terms are:

physical therapy

physical therapy assistants

occupational therapy

massage therapy

kinesiology

musculoskeletal system

anatomy

Google Scholar can be a powerful source of scholarly information. It's easy to use, looking and feeling just like Google. But the results you will get will be very different.

Here's some of what you may find:

1. Peer-reviewed journal articles
2. Other previously published journal articles 
3. Unpublished scholarly articles 
4. Master's theses and other degree or classwork 
5. Citations for books, some of which link to parts of the actual book online. 

The LCC Library participates in the Google Scholar Library Links program.  If you set your Google Scholar Settings to include links to articles found in LCC Library databases, you will be able to access full-text (that is, the entire article instead of just the citation and abstract), peer-reviewed articles from LCC Library databases as well as other sources.

Depending on your research situation or patient, information from these websites may be helpful:

• Mayo Clinic
• Medline Plus (patient centered information)
• APTA (Association for Physical Therapists Assistants) or other associations
• CDC (Centers for Disease Control)
• NIH (National Institutes of Health) for info/statistics